She by the gods resented it. Py scored a point, and she was absolutely scowling when the airlock door opened and it was Chihin facing Fala and Hallan with a double armload of stsho.
“We need the gurney,” she said shortly. “We need gtst excellency to the sickbay and we need the medical supplies, probably vitamin and mineral supplements—“
“A bath,” gtst breathed, “oh, estimables, a bath, among first things, cleanly light, wai, the distress and the suffering I have endured—“
“Gtstshows improvement,” Hilfy said dryly. “Na Hallan, never mind the gurney, just carry gtst, “
“Aye, captain,” he said, and walked on.
“Tarras,” Hilfy said, “to the dispensary.” “She’s down there,” Chihin said. “She’s already setting up.”
Good gods, initiative. Right decisions. The crew knew what was going on, the crew all of a sudden knew it was their responsibility to move in advance of orders: it wasn’t—it never had been that they didn’t know what they were doing. Three of them had come in with experience.
The captain hadn’t. And the old women had been right: Rhean had been right: she hadn’t had the experience.
Mark another one for aunt Pyanfar. The crew wasn’t unhappy, the crew suddenly had the latitude to do what it reasonably thought it ought to, the crew might be a little gods-be scared at the moment, but it was by the ever-living gods functioning ahead of the game for the first time in recent memory.
“I want a—“—thorough check against stsho parameters, she was about to say when she faced Tarras in the lab, but Tarras said to Hallan: “Put gtst excellency there, I’ve got the tests set up.”
She could on the one hand feel superfluous. On the other she had enough on her hands—like getting the entire conversation down as she recalled it, like running it through the kifish translation program, looking for significances and omissions.
The captain wasn’t strictly speaking a flight officer on this ship, but the captain with her head clear could make judgment calls that a protocol officer could make—and if there was a time to make them it was now.
Tell gtst excellency Tlisi-tlas-tin that gtst excellency Atli-Iyen-tlas was lying disreputable in sickbay? Not yet. Not until they knew whether gtst excellency was going to live or die—or whether gtst excellency was still Atli-lyen-tlas.
Chapter Eighteen
There was a time one was superfluous, and Hallan had learned to know it. He hovered near the doorway while Tarras gave orders to Fala, and Fala gave him looks while she was carrying this and carrying that.
“I do like you,” he contrived to say, when Fala’s fetching and carrying paused her near him. “I really do, Fala, I just—“
Fala retrieved the kit she was after and went across the small surgery to where Tarras was ministering to gtst excellency with small and delicate needles, murmuring words of encouragement, assuring gtst that it was exactly what the computer had said to do.
Fala didn’t want to talk to him. He didn’t entirely blame her. He didn’t feel welcome here, where people who knew what they were doing were trying to save the stsho gentleman’s—or lady’s—life…
He found it more convenient to edge toward the door, and when no one seemed to notice that fact, to edge out it, and into the main lower corridor.
But ops was down there, and Chihin was working lowerdeck ops, and he didn’t want to go down there; and did, desperately…
Except it was too desperate and dangerous a situation to cause anybody more trouble than he had.
He wanted to apologize to Fala; and, really, truly, he wanted to patch it up: yes, he was attracted to Fala, at least she was pretty and she was clever and she was somebody he wanted very much to have like him, except it wasn’t anything like the feeling he got when he even thought about Chihin.
Which told him it was the last place in the universe he needed to be when things were at a crisis and Chihin was supposed to be doing her job and there was a problem between them.
No business on a ship, the captain had said; and he didn’t want to prove that by creating another problem for the captain. The crew lounge was where the captain had appointed him to go when she wanted him out of trouble and out of sight, and he went down the corridor as carefully as under fire, avoiding Chihin and avoiding any chance of running into the stsho, and got as far as the lift and rode it topside.